Includes bibliographical references

Prologue: Whose Garden Was This? / David Brower -- 1. The Big Boys. Jack Culberg. Wallace Rasmussen. Paul Miller -- 2. The Money Tree. Estelle Strongin. Katherine "Kit" Tremaine. W.H. "Ping" Ferry -- 3. The Learning Tree. Rochelle Lee. Timuel Black. Aki Kurose. Gertie Fox -- 4. The Firm. Charles A. Bane. Judith Vladeck. Ernest Goodman -- 5. Hold the Fort. Victor Reuther. Genora Johnson Dollinger. Charles Hayes. Marvin Miller -- 6. Working the Land. Jessie de la Cruz. Merle Hansen -- 7. Songs My Mother Taught Me. Russell Knapp. Hazel Wolf -- 8. The Muse. Jacob Lawrence. Katherine Kuh. Katherine Dunham. Uta Hagen. Milt Hinton -- 9. On the Air. Norman Corwin. Robert St. John. Charlie Andrews -- 10. The Pitch. Charles A. Kasher. Danny Newman -- 11. God. Rev. William Augustus Johnson. Betty McCollister. Richard McSorley, S.J. Virginia Bowers -- 12. Community. Joe Begley. Wallace and Juanita Nelson. Raymond Koch. Bresci Thompson. Guadalupe Reyes -- 13. Health. Quentin Young, M.D

Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It is a collective portrait of our times, woven from the voices of seventy very different people, the youngest of whom is seventy and the oldest ninety-nine. Together they give us an extraordinary panorama of American life and work throughout this century and underscore the ways in which the times have changed

Coming of Age is also, in many ways, a sequel to Terkel's acclaimed Working (1974), for it traces the extraordinary ways our working lives have changed in the past few decades - often beyond recognition. We meet politicians and preachers, advertising men and hucksters. Here is the partner in a large law firm, suing the colleagues who have forced him out; here, too, is the carpenter, accepting as inevitable the replacement of his skilled tasks by machine. But this is not a group of disgruntled Luddites; most accept - indeed welcome - the new technologies, yet they all deplore the degree to which human contact has declined and how traditional hopes and aspirations have been superseded by the often ruthless demands of the modern corporation

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